The iGaming industry keeps expanding and transforming year after year. The turnover of the regulated market alone has already reached tens of billions of dollars per year. Companies are introducing visually appealing slots and coming up with fresh methods to attract players. However, while the overall picture is clear, detailing the trends provides a sharper vision of the entire market situation, which means it helps to find new options, mechanics, and approaches through which you can claim a piece of this Gambling pie. The 888STARZ Partners team has analyzed the top 8 latest trends in affiliate marketing for 2025.
#1: Active crackdown on illegal operators
Illegal operators refer to products without local licenses. Since 2023, governments in most countries around the world have been actively rejecting casinos and bookmakers that do not have licenses in their jurisdictions. Even if a product has a Curaçao license, this does not guarantee its long-term survival in a specific region. Therefore, working with official products that have a local presence will become more stable.
This offers many advantages, starting with the possibility of local advertising and increased brand recognition (which subsequently positively affects audience response to your advertising), ending with player retention and LTV (Lifetime Value). Do you really think a player will struggle with a VPN and bypass restrictions, risking their security, to access a blocked product? Especially when there’s thousands of alternatives available online.
#2: New bonus formats
Classic free spins and hundreds of percent on deposits are used even in official products. However, they have started to blur in users’ eyes. Everyone has them, and products understand this, which is why they are actively pushing new types of bonuses, including free bets, no-deposit free spins, balances, and much more.
Pay attention to products that allow for personalized bonuses, for example, issuing a unique promo code and conditions. This trend is visible among bookmakers working with streamers on Twitch. Having just a couple of hundred (but preferably thousands) of followers is enough to get noticed.
#3: Neural networks
Artificial intelligence provides marketers with a wide range of opportunities for creating ad creatives, web pages, and text. Neural networks help collect and analyze vast amounts of data, significantly saving time. Another remarkable advantage of AI models is that neural networks allow you to create nearly ready-to-use landing pages.
No deep knowledge of HTML markup or CSS is required for this. Imagine this: in just a few minutes, you can generate dozens of different banners for your advertising campaign. Creating a promotional video with AI-generated actors will take a bit more time and effort. Here are a few popular neural networks that are widely used in advertising campaigns within the iGaming industry:
- MidJourney;
- DALL-E;
- ChatGPT-4;
- Stable Diffusion;
- Sora.
Source: Precedence Research
Speaking of new trends, we cannot overlook virtual assistants. In the coming year, voice assistants will become even more widespread. They will be capable of handling content creation and optimization — all through voice commands. Voice search will also be a major trend in marketing. In the near future, people will increasingly use voice commands to browse products and make purchases.
#4: Long vertical videos
For many years, long videos were considered suitable only for platforms like YouTube. However, in 2023-2024, this type of video content has also gained significant popularity on TikTok and, to some extent, on Instagram. Vertical videos longer than two minutes are now widely enjoyed by users across various social media platforms.
Vertical-format videos are optimized for both recording and viewing on mobile devices. Therefore, advertising integrations must be created and optimized with this format in mind. By following this recommendation, you can ensure a broader audience reach.
#5: In-house communities within products
A recent survey revealed that 85% of online consumers appreciate brands that communicate consistently through various digital channels. For this reason a company without active social media today is unlikely to survive even for a year. This is especially true for online bookmakers and casinos.
Virtually every good product invests in actively maintained platforms, from messengers to YouTube channels and TikTok videos, where clients, both real and potential, receive information, entertain themselves, and also have the opportunity to earn additional credits in their accounts. This always works and creates a strong product-community connection.
#6: Cybersport
Beyond the usual slots and sports betting, new formats of gambling are actively entering the market. We remember when virtual blackjack and poker appeared on platforms, where the player had to choose what would happen next. Now the trend has slightly changed. It has been replaced by esports, and today the most popular disciplines include:
- CS2;
- Dota 2;
- FIFA;
- Valorant.
Esports is especially popular in certain regions. Among them, Asia and Brazil occupy the highest positions. In the CIS, Europe, and North American markets, the volume of funds is much higher, but the popularity of the niche is somewhat lower. This indicates that there are prospects, either in terms of quality or the number of players worldwide, regardless of Tier.
eSports audience size worldwide from 2020 to 2025, by type of viewers
Source: Statista
#7: Personalization
Both products and affiliates are beginning to actively segment the audience they want to attract to a particular product. This is evident, for example, in the slots offered by the product and bonus formats. Webmasters personalize their work with traffic by selecting a narrow target audience, creating unique and diverse creatives instead of mass dumping, and using different sources for specific categories of users.
Personalization is also seen in placement platforms. Companies from other industries (for example, taxis, food delivery services, streaming platforms, etc.) have long been pushing this trend. But now, as iGaming companies have caught on to the trend, they have also started creating their own bloggers or acquiring opinion leaders, forming community management teams, and segmenting traffic sources. Companies and webmasters are actively analyzing promising platforms for advertising placement and preparing unique creatives and texts, as well as specific conditions for the audience.
#8: Service improvement
This issue concerns both clients and affiliates who bring in these clients. If a product wants to survive in the conditions of massive competition, it must ensure that users and partners have the most convenient conditions for working and entertainment.
For clients, this should mean prompt support services, loyalty programs, and adaptation to user conditions (device, language, format, etc.). For webmasters, this should mean clear and transparent conditions, no hidden parameters, easy and understandable access to statistics and personal accounts, and the ability to request information from the product. A player will not play if it is inconvenient, and an affiliate will not attract clients if it does not provide the desired results.
Conclusion
Undoubtedly, even in 2025, we will see many more updates. But we must start using the conditions and information that the market is already providing. There are a lot of exciting things ahead, and to be ready for it, we cannot ignore current trends. If you want to stay up-to-date with all the latest tendencies in the iGaming industry, check out the 888STARZ Partners blog. Our team regularly updates it with new articles covering top promotion methods, popular tools, and trending GEOs for traffic flow. Don’t miss out — dive into the blog now and stay ahead of the game!
Read more: Affiliate marketing niches
